KUNDUZ CITY, Afghanistan (Reuters) – The Afghan army and police on Thursday failed to expel Taliban fighters from the outskirts of a besieged provincial capital as a seventh day of fierce fighting put pressure on national forces struggling largely without U.S. military backup.

The Taliban push is a major test of the Afghan security forces trained by NATO, which ended its combat mission in Afghanistan in December, 13 years after the U.S.-backed military intervention that toppled the hard-line Islamist regime.

The governor of the northern province of Kunduz vowed that the capital, Kunduz city, would not fall to the insurgents, but acknowledged that pushing back the Taliban was proving tough.

“It goes very slowly because we do not want defenseless civilians to suffer,” said governor Mohammad Omar Safi.

Four civilians had been wounded, he said, along with 20 Afghan soldiers and police killed and 140 Taliban-allied fighters dead, many of them militants from neighboring Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

The Taliban, for their part, claimed to have killed 232 Afghan security forces and lost only nine fighters.

Heavy artillery and gunfire rang out on Thursday as government forces fought in two districts on the city’s outskirts.

Despite thousands of army reinforcements sent to Kunduz, Taliban fighters held the same positions as several days ago, Mohammad Ali, a local militia commander, complained.

“The government hasn’t even made one step forward,” Ali said, after visiting two districts just 5 km (3 miles) from the governor’s compound.

Dawlat Waziri, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, insisted the Afghan national forces had made progress.

“We have the upper hand in this fight,” Waziri said.

Kunduz was the insurgents’ last stronghold before the U.S.- led forces drove them from power.

A scaled-down NATO mission now mostly trains and advises Afghan forces, although U.S. drones still target militant leaders and an American counter-terrorist force also operates in the country.

The national capital, Kabul, has not seen major violence in the week-old Taliban offensive.

Instead, residents were hit by internet disruptions after a fiber optic cable that supplies Kabul was damaged in the east.

The communications ministry said militants blew up the cable on Wednesday and it would be repaired once security forces arrived to escort engineers to the site.

“At the moment, in Kabul, we are relying on a back-up system that delivers from the north,” the deputy minister for IT, Aimal Marjan, told Reuters.

It was unclear if insurgents deliberately targeted the cable. A Taliban spokesman said he was unaware of the incident and declined immediate comment.

KABUL (Reuters) – A car bomb targeting an international zone known as the Green Village rocked eastern Kabul on Wednesday evening followed by bursts of gunfire, police and residents said.

A Reuters photographer at the scene said the street outside the Green Village, a heavily guarded complex housing foreign contractors and various facilities, had been sealed off and Afghan security forces were clearing the area.

“It was a car bomb that targeted the Green Village,” said Sediq Sediqqi, an interior ministry spokesman. “Police are deployed in the area but no gunfire is heard at the moment.”

The jihadist Afghan Taliban, ousted from power by a U.S.-led coalition in 2001, have been staging almost daily attacks in Kabul as foreign troops leave the country this year but no one immediately claimed responsibility for the latest attack.

“There are still no reports of possible casualties. It will become clear later as soon as the area has been totally cleared by Afghan forces,” said Hashmat Stanekzai, a spokesman for the Kabul police chief.

On Tuesday morning, a truck bomb ripped through the outer perimeter of a foreign security compound in Kabul, killing two Afghan security guards and wounding a foreigner.

Attacks on foreign troops, Afghan government officials and security forces have intensified as the international military coalition ends operations, leaving the fight against the Taliban insurgency mostly to Afghan forces.

Last Friday was a public holiday here in Afghanistan but I was on call and had gone for lunch in Kabul with my friends. Our relaxing day was interrupted by a huge explosion.

It took little time to figure out what was going on. As on most days, working or not, I carry my cameras so I jumped in my car and rushed towards the noise. My colleague Mohammad Ismail, who was enjoying a day off also, heard the explosion and called me as I headed towards the scene saying that he was coming to help cover the story. I spoke to my text and TV colleagues at Reuters bureau although the sound of the attack was too loud to hear easily but they were well aware of the incident.

As a safety measure I kept colleagues in the bureau informed of our plans and movements.

I left my car with my friend, put on my protective gear and continued on foot as the police had blocked all roads in the area. These kinds of incidents are not new to us and we are well practiced in how to react. We work with safety in mind and coordinate with our Kabul bureau. While shooting pictures I assessed the situation around every second and moved ahead cautiously.

Police stopped me several times as I walked, to check my IDs but let me continue once they were confident I was not a suspicious person. I was the first photographer at the explosion site and I positioned myself in a safe position, using a long lens to take pictures. When some of the policemen carried wounded comrades towards me I used a wide lens. Before long I started hearing shooting and realized that it was not just an explosion and I guessed some attackers had gone inside the building.

Police started pushing us away and I moved several blocks away to an even more secure location.

I was sure I had some decent pictures and needed to edit and file. Kabul doesn’t have enough mobile bandwidth internet so we have to go back to our office to file. The attack was still underway and I didn’t want to leave. Nobody had any idea what might happen next. By now my colleague Ismail was on the other side of the attack area but we decided to stay put to keep an eye out until it was clearer where this was headed.

Reuters Afghanistan chief photographer, Ahmad Masood, who is based in Delhi, was on holiday in Kabul and went to our office to help edit and file our pictures. I sent the pictures I had shot with our driver Ishaq to the bureau. This put us more than two hours ahead of the competition and took a load off my mind. It was good team work.

It may sound easy but it is difficult to work when these incidents happen. I am a father of five children and when I took pictures of the children screaming and running away in total shock, it made me really sad and helpless. But in the end the children were safe.

Usually when I go to shoot for a story, we are faced with a bomb blast, a suicide attack, or some other type of violence here in Afghanistan. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised when I visited Afghanistan’s National Institute of Music. Even though I have lived in Kabul for many years, I had no clue this academy even existed — it is the only of its kind in the whole country.

Foreigners and Afghans teach young Afghans how to play all sorts of instruments, as well as to sing. What struck me most is the opportunity given to women. There are not many opportunities for women in Afghanistan to play or sing music — during the Taliban era (from 1996-2001) music was outright banned and women were basically taken away from public life.

So, being at the school, and seeing young girls learn how to play music, actually gave me some hope about my country and made me think perhaps we can live in peace in the future. This is not the usual feeling I have after an assignment.

The first music school within the Ministry of Education was established in 1973. In the late 1980s, this school merged with the School of Fine Arts and operated until 1992, when civil war consumed Afghanistan. In 2001, the music department within the School of Fine Arts re-opened with a lot of limitations: no rehearsing rooms, trained music teachers, or musical instruments.

In 2006, Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, then a Research Fellow at the Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, initiated the Revival of Afghan Music (ROAM) project. ROAM made twelve recommendations, including the establishment of a dedicated vocational music education entity. In 2007, Monash University began discussions with the Ministry of Education of Afghanistan about the establishment of a music institution that would provide general education as well as specialist training in Afghan and Western music. In April 2008, Dr. Sarmast went to Afghanistan to lead and implement this project. With the full support of the Ministry of Education, the World Bank, and our other donors, Dr. Sarmast began rebuilding music education and establishing Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) by converting the music department into an entity independent from the School of Fine Arts. A thorough renovation of the building equipped it with all the resources and facilities of a world-class music school, such as soundproofed rehearsing rooms, a high quality collection of instruments, and an international faculty. The program was expanded from six years to ten years of education.

On June 20, 2010, ANIM was inaugurated before an audience of invited dignitaries who then toured the completely renovated building. ANIM’s orchestra, the Afghan Youth Orchestra, has frequently performed for President Hamid Karzai, members of the Afghan cabinet, ambassadors from many countries including the USA, Finland, and Germany, and many other dignitaries.

In December 2010, ANIM launched the First Annual Afghanistan Winter Music Academy, the country’s first music festival to combine performance and education. The festival attracted eighteen internationally acclaimed guest educators and performers from Afghanistan, Canada, France, Germany, India, Iran, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Generously funded by the Embassy of the United States, the Embassy of Finland, and the Goethe Institute, the Winter Academy provided an extraordinary variety of educational opportunities to our students, who were joined by students from Herat and Kabul.